Plan

Notes de l’auteur

The year is taken to begin on 1 January and English dates are ‘old style’. European precedes English date where both are reported. The imprints of seventeenth-century works are reproduced in abbreviated form: ‘by’ indicates the printer and ‘for’/‘sold by’ the bookseller. Place of publication where not stated is London. This article has been completed thanks to a two-month stay in London as a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths College in 2006. I am most grateful to Ariel Hessayon, Ann-Marie Kilgallon, Andrea Romani, Simona Troilo and Stefano Villani for their help, and to a number of librarians in England and the USA who kindly checked on my behalf the copies of An Admonition given unto Mr. Saltmarsh held by their libraries. I must also thank Jean Pierre Cavaillé for offering the opportunity to publish this article and David Thomas for the final language editing. I alone am responsible for any mistakes or shortcomings.

6 T. H. H. Rae, John Dury and the royal road to piety (Frankfurt am Main, 1998). This work is a slig (...)

1John Dury has regularly featured in the religious and intellectual histories of the British seventeenth century in the last sixty years. His figure has mainly been constructed around three overlapping images: the irenic champion, the educational forerunner, and the utopian type of a Puritan ‘Great Instauration’. Studies focussed at first on his irenic mission to reconcile the Protestant churches throughout Europe.2 Then, following the rediscovery of Samuel Hartlib’s papers, scholars explored his constant, indeed fundamental, involvement in the circle of the Polish reformer transplanted to England. In this context, they have underlined the importance of the intellectual relationships and the spiritual brotherhood with the Czech polymath Jan Amos Komenius, the third in the triumvirate of foreign ‘philosophers’ who briefly gathered together in England on the eve of the Civil Wars.3 Accordingly, emphasis has been placed on Dury’s ideas on education, university reform, the advancement and dissemination of learning. Charles Webster’s works on Hartlib’s circle have greatly contributed to establishing John Dury’s writings and endeavours firmly at the centre of the utopian impulse which characterised the English revolution.4 Richard H. Popkin has viewed them as being part of the ‘third force of the seventeenth century’, whose blending of rationalism and millenarianism can be considered crucial to the understanding of the construction of modern scientific thought. As a corollary, attention has been paid to Dury’s interest in the readmission of the Jews into England, which was widely shared in the millenarian climate of the 1640s and 1650s.5 In the framework of a rather traditional history of ideas, however, the only extended study on Dury still depicts the Scottish reformer as a forerunner of modern educational thought.6

7 Rae, John Dury and the royal road to piety,73; Batten, John Dury. Advocate of Christian Reunion, 1 (...)

2Theoretical and practical efforts for the reform of schools and universities certainly occupied a conspicuous place in Dury’s activities. He regarded them, indeed, as an integral part of his schemes for advancing Christian unity. By giving too much credit to his self-portrait as an ‘unchanged peacemaker’ standing above ‘parties’, however, twentieth century studies have generally relegated Dury’s involvement in the politics of revolutionary England to the margins. Even his role as an official propagandist for the Commonwealth, which led him to be one of the most important voices in buttressing obedience to de facto power, has been treated as a kind of constraint imposed by the world on a consistent Christian reformer.7 Only a few years ago, Anthony Milton began to challenge this long-lasting image of an idealist irenicist, who was either too single-minded or too naïve according to historians’ tastes. Milton offers a compelling analysis of Dury’s flexible political skilfulness in shifting allegiances in order to pursue his schemes for the reunion of the Protestant Churches from the 1630s to the early 1640s.8 This understanding may be related to a more general problematical framework concerning irenicism, which is hardly synonymous with toleration and antonymous with persecution.9 The rhetoric of Christian unity, as Milton underlines, was politically ambiguous insofar as ‘it could be appealed to both as a shield and as an offensive weapon in religious politics’: the distinction of ‘fundamental’ and ‘non-fundamental’ could be used both to rally the camp of an orthodoxy which was felt to be under attack or to undermine it, by extending the latitude for inclusion.10

3The aim of this article is to elaborate the context in which Dury first conceived his renowned schemes for educational reform along with those for achieving religious peace in England. In the light of new evidence, it will be argued that they were shaped by his active engagement in the political battles of the mid-1640s and by his perception of a radical challenge to the very idea of a Christian State.

11 J. Saltmarsh, A new quere, at this time seasonably to be considered (for Giles Calvert, 1645) S491 (...)

12 J. Dury, A demonstration of the Necessity of settling some Gospel Government Amongst the Churches (...)

4Dury’s interest in educational reform was re-kindled when he returned to England in 1645 after having spent some years in Holland. The writings published between 1645 and 1653 have constituted till now the principal sources for the analysis of his religious and pedagogical ideas. Furthermore, ever since Turnbull’s “gleanings” from the Hartlib Papers historians have been aware that Dury had written a catechism in 1646 during his pastoral incumbency at Winchester Cathedral. Dury described to Hartlib the structure of this work, to which he seemed to devote much of his efforts between April and September 1646. He also gave precise directions to his friend in London on the manner of printing it. In this particularly continuous series of letters, Dury’s drafting of the catechetical work intersected with a number of preoccupations which followed him from London to Winchester in late March 1646. There, he finished writing a response to a pamphlet by John Saltmarsh, A New Quere published on 30 September 1645 for Giles Calvert,11 and sent it to Hartlib to be printed at once. While he was in Winchester, however, Saltmarsh published further pamphlets which continued to challenge the authority of the Assembly of Divines. For this reason, Dury wrote an ‘Admonition’, which he instructed Hartlib to forwardto Saltmarsh. While the analysis of the New Quere was eventually published after an eight-year delay – under the title The Demonstration of the Necessity of settling some Gospel-Government12 – the catechetical work and the ‘Admonition’ against Saltmarsh have been thought not to have been printed or no longer to be extant.

5Both were indeed printed and are still extant. The letters to Hartlib permit us to identify them with the anonymous An Admonition given unto Mr. Saltmarsh and Some Forms of Catecheticall Doctrines. The first was acquired by Thomason on 6 August 1646, while the second bore the date 1647 on the imprint and is very rare.13 They allow The Demonstration of the Necessity of settling some Gospel-Government to be placed in its original polemical and political context.

14 ‘Context’ and ‘substance’ appear as mutually alternative in the typology recently offered by Glenn (...)

6Once the writings of 1646 are taken together, a general framework of thought emerges where a central theme was to shore up the ministry and the early-modern unity of Church and State. Since Dury’s reflections are directed against what he felt to be a fatal menace to their foundations, analysing them and their chosen antagonists may contribute to showing how a contextualist approach may enable a substantive definition of the radical and conservative camps during the English revolution.14 Through rapidly changing contexts, Dury’s constancy consisted in opposing principles of toleration and ‘publicity’ which were changing the relationship between the individual and authority.

16 M. Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints. The Separate Church of London 1616-1648 (Cambridge, 1977), 8 (...)

17 R. S. Paul, The Assembly of The Lord. Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the ‘G (...)

7In the 1630s, Dury had considered the support of Archbishop Laud as essential and had accepted ordination by the Church of England in order to promote a European Protestant confederation. True to this aim, as Anthony Milton has shown, he continually re-framed his political allegiances and strategy from the start of the Scottish crisis in 1637. Forsaking Laud, he joined first with the supporters of a reduced episcopacy, then realized his best hope was in following the rising stars of Presbyterianism.15 The political puzzle was not as easy however. The agreement reached at Calamy’s house in late 1641 between Presbyterian and Independents not publicly to harm each other silenced the differences within the Puritan front for a time.16 The Solemn League and Covenant also superficially compacted the two main religious backbones of the Parliamentary party for the needs of war. But the fire of disagreement was still smouldering beneath the ashes. Conflict was for a while contained within the Assembly of Divines. Here, dissensions over the ordination of Ministers and over the Scottish model of church government were quelled by the Presbyterian majority. The small group of Independent divines in the Assembly, the Dissenting Brethren who made their criticisms public with the Apologeticall Narration, were defeated during 1644. By the spring of the following year, the Presbyterian frame of the English Church was rapidly taking shape through the deliberations of the Assembly.17

18 Batten, John Dury. Advocate of Christian Reunion, 100-101; The Vow which J.D. hath made, and the C (...)

8The internecine religious conflict substantially changed the scope of a possible politics of irenicism. The problem of an agreement on doctrinal matters among the different strands of the European Reformation gave way to the more pressing need for working out an accommodation between new-fangled confessional divisions on matters of discipline and church government in England. Dury followed the English troubles from Holland where he was in the service of Princess Mary, wife of William of Orange. He regarded the Solemn League and Covenant as a ‘national pledge’ to settle religious and civil quarrels. He consequently protested to the Assembly his commitment to Christian unity and his loyalty to the King, when he saw it becoming a badge for party allegiance, in December 1643.18 Nevertheless, his correspondence with Philip Nye and Thomas Goodwin, who had consulted him early in 1642, shows the extent to which Dury was inclined to support the arguments of the Presbyterians.

9Though he initially presented himself as a potential mediator between the parties, the Independents’ aspirations to toleration for their congregations were almost inevitably bound to be excluded by his idea of ‘brotherly communion’. This was based on the determination of ‘the fundamentalls in Faith and Practice’, by ‘analyzing the Text of Holy Scripture demonstratively’.19 It was on these grounds that Dury invited Nye and Goodwin openly to state their case. When they failed to do so and the Dissenting Brethren’s Apologetical Narration was published, it was hardly surprising that he warned against the ‘schism’ of those whom he now called ‘non-communionists’: commenting to Hartlib, who had solicited his opinion, Dury emphasised their apparent unwillingness to show their intended scheme of church government and the newness of their proposals, to which they could not attach sufficient biblical proofs, in contrast with the Presbyterian model and the examples of ‘the best reformed Churches’. The toleration they desired was not the attitude of forbearance which the apostle advised for mutual edification. It meant to ‘breake the bonds of Spirituall Unitie’. It was, in Dury’s view, ‘no Wisedome to authorize two different Wayes of Church Government in a State’, unless in a ‘Machivilian’ plan to further strife and division contrary to any ‘Christian policy’.20

10In fact, Dury underlined the points which loomed large in the confrontation between the Presbyterian majority of the Assembly and the Dissenting Brethren and which ultimately would result in their definitive rupture in 1646. He added that the State could tolerate the Independents temporarily so as to avoid ‘Publike Evills’, until a ‘brotherly’ conference would find a way of accommodation. To this end, the Independents had to give to the Parliament ‘a draught of the Whole Way which they intend to follow in Gathering, Framing, and Governing their Churches according to Gods Ordinances’. But ‘let the State require Silence on all sydes & a Cessacion from public writings of the Subiect of Independancy’.21

22 Batten, John Dury. Advocate of Christian Reunion, 94-99.

23 HP, 3/2/2a-3b, “John Dury To [Hartlib]”, 3 March 1644. Dury had been accused of ‘going ouer by the (...)

24 ‘Baillie to William Spang’, 19 April 1644 in R. Baillie, The Letters and Journals, Edinburgh, 1841 (...)

11Already called by the Parliament to replace Calibute Downing in June 1643, Dury had delayed joining the Assembly of Divines for two years partly as a matter of personal choice, partly because the Staatholder Frederick Henry did not want members of his court to be implicated in English affairs. In January 1644, having been substituted in his office at The Hague, Dury was free to return to England, but deferred again and assumed the ministry of the Church of the English merchants at Rotterdam.22 His previous wavering between the different sides had not gone unnoticed and had caused him to be regarded with suspicion, especially by the Scottish commissioners to the Assembly of Divines and their English allies. Besides, his activities in Holland had provoked criticisms among the English community and accusations that he was plotting to favour the cause of the King. It was to Dury’s defence against those accusations –which, as it appears from the letters of March 1644 to Hartlib, he most probably communicated to the Assembly via Walter Strickland23– that Robert Baillie reserved his well-known sneering comments and told William Spang ‘as yow love the man, persuade him to stay at this time where he is: he cannot be so well or honourablie imployed any where I know”.24 For his part, Dury declared to Hartlib and his future wife, Dorothy Moore, that he wanted to ‘deale more openly’ and asked them to make public his thoughts on church settlement. Hartlib’s publication of Dury’s letters to Goodwin and Nye and of the examination of the Apologeticall Narration might have been a deliberate move in rescuing Dury’s reputation so as to pave his way to the Jerusalem Chamber. Baillie was actually more friendly with Dury when, passing through Rotterdam in April 1645, he reassured him of ‘how deep the intentions of the scottes Divines lye towards an uniuersall Coresspondencie’. This statement arose from a worried Dury having been informed by Baillie about Hartlib’s prefatory letter to Hezekias Woodward’s response to the Antapologia of Thomas Edwards. Dury had a clear idea on which side his and Hartlib’s hopes for the advancement of ecumenical projects lay, even if upon an ‘impartial’ perusal of his friend’s letter he found nothing to reproach.25 As ever, being ‘without partialitie & free from siding’ was a difficult course to navigate in troubled waters. Still in August 1644, Hartlib had not thought it fit to forward to the Assembly one of Dury’s letters, seemingly intended to get backing from them for his ‘middle way’ reform of the churches of Rotterdam and the Netherlands.26

12On finally entering the Jerusalem Chamber, Dury appeared fully inclined to cooperate with the majority of the Assembly in bringing forth a Presbyterian church government. On 12 August 1645 he took the Protestation and, on 29 August, the Covenant. Soon after, he joined the Committee which dealt with the case of the anti-Trinitarian, Paul Best. On 17 November, Dury was added to the revived Committee for Accommodation. The following February he was part of another committee dealing with the ‘whole head of Christian Liberty’.27 While tension was heightening in London and the Assembly began to clash with the Erastian opinion dominant among MPs, he had been nominated, together with Peter Sterry, to preach to the Houses: he expounded the need for cooperation between the Ministry and the Magistrate in leading the country from Babylon to New Jerusalem and establishing its ‘order’.28

29 Dury’s presence at the Assembly is recorded by his vote in the Session of 7 July 1646, (Mitchell, (...)

13We can grasp from the minutes of the Assembly that Dury assiduously attended its meeting until the end of March 1646, when he took up his new appointment as minister of Winchester Cathedral. After the Parliament had rebuked the Assembly for breaking its privilege in advancing the ‘divine right of Presbytery’, Dury returned to London between May and July, precisely when the Divines were handling this burning issue.29 In December 1646, when he left Winchester to be tutor to the King’s younger children, Dury appears once again to have been a regular attendee at the Assembly. The minutes attest that he was often nominated to pray with the members of the Houses of Lords and the Commons, maintained relationships with foreign Churches and intellectuals, served in several committees, and dealt with questions about the Septuagint, the Confession of Faith and their printing. It seems that he also played an active part in drafting the Larger and Shorter Catechisms and in dealing with issues about liturgy and the ordination of ministers.30 In February 1648 he toyed with supporting the translation of Jacob Aconcio’s Stratagemata Satanae, which fell under the censorious eye of Francis Cheynell. At that time, his confidence in the Assembly was fading. His last known appearance at the Jerusalem Chamber was in January 1649, when he and John Marshall were chosen to pray.31

14Dury had taken his seat in the Jerusalem Chamber just when the political climate was again becoming heated. Having revived their dissension when debate touched on the power of excommunication within congregations, the Dissenting Brethren were compelled by the Presbyterian majority to retire from the plenary session to consult and produce the complete framework of their model – a decision on which Dury, as we have seen, would agree. The Independents interpreted this as a move to get rid of them, while the majority hastened the reform of the Church in a Presbyterian mould, and, already during the summer, appeared to have given up on the idea of presenting their model to the Assembly. Factional politics was gaining momentum. The Presbyterians skirmished with the Parliamentarian backers of the Independent Divines in a round of reciprocally compromising intelligence: insinuations were spread about secret and allegedly treacherous bargaining by Lord Say and Sele, Sir Henry Vane jr. and Oliver St. John with the King.32 Without the Dissenting Brethren, the Assembly was able to draft the new framework of church government on a Scottish model in July and on 19 August the Parliament approved the first ordinance to set up classes, the provincial assemblies and the national assembly.33

34 K. Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), 379-380.

15At the end of September, the Presbyterians intensified their efforts by mobilizing their London supporters, and the Westminster Assembly intimated to the Dissenting Brethren to deliver their model without further delay. Meanwhile, the Independents seized the advantage by circulating the famous letter by Oliver Cromwell throughout London, which exalted the unity of a victorious Army in contrast to the struggles in the Parliament and Assembly over church uniformity and coercion of conscience.34 Shortly after having consigned to Giles Calvert a book defending Independency, Henry Burton launched an invective against the ‘blind’ London parishioners who were signing a petition to hasten the Presbyterian settlement: they were supporting an ecclesiastical scheme whose particulars were not public.35 Again from Calvert’s bookshop, on 30 September, John Saltmarsh’s ANew Quere maintained that the time was not ripe to settle the Church: settlement would be the result of a spiritual growth of English Christians through open dialogue and mutual edification.36

38 [R. Overton], The Last Warning to the City of London (1646); M. Tolmie, Triumph of the Saint, 131; (...)

16From then on, a sharp confrontation between two opposing religious ‘parties’ went on from London pulpits and presses, while the Independents, by announcing in October that they would not deliver the framework of their church model, set themselves up to join the Separatists in the call for a broad toleration. In January and February 1646, this became a heated public debate in which Presbyterians played their long-awaited ace, Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena.37 In March, the conflicting parties almost came to a fist-fight in front of the Guildhall. The Last Warning to the City of London by Richard Overton, which reported the sectarian version of this episode, began to shift arguments for toleration towards a political critique of monarchy.38

39 Dury, Israel’s Call, 47.

17The public contest had sprung up in September 1645, when Dury had just arrived in London. In his sermon of November 1645, he had sensed the growing challenge from without the walls of the Jerusalem Chamber and had warned against those who wanted to delay the church settlement and to put secular and political concerns before it.39 Convinced that division among the ministers opened the way for the secular policy of the ‘Devil’, and that the ministry should resolve its differences by conference away from public dispute, he had been part of the revived Committee for an Accommodation, which ended in failure by March 1646. While the political confrontation reached its climax, Dury was already on his way to Winchester, taking with him his worries about the dangers of a ‘paper-debate’, against which he had not been able to warn the men in power.

18On 31 March, Dury sent a letter to Hartlib to forward to the Solicitor Oliver St. John. He was keen to assure St. John, one of the leading MPs among the Independents, that Presbyterians would have granted the ‘indulgence they sue for’ to the Dissenting Brethren. However, it was still necessary that the Dissenting Brethren showed their ecclesiastical model ‘positiuely & fully’. This need had now, he felt, become more pressing because contention had reached its most urgent point. While Dury was leaving London, the long-deferred confrontation of the Divines with Parliament over the Divine Right of the Presbytery had finally exploded and Independents’ and sectarians’ propaganda were throwing in their lot with the Erastian majority of MPs. Writing to St. John, Dury insisted that the ‘dissenting partie’ should declare ‘obligatorily to some tye of union which should bee betweene them & their Brethren’ and ‘their aduice concerning the waye & meanes of taking awaye the offences & scandales which may breake that tye & disturbe the settlement of their Peace’.40 They should choose church uniformity, leaving aside the temptation to unleash sectarian and unsound opinions for reasons of political calculation. Indeed, replying –in a letter to Hartlib on 14 April– to Cheney Culpeper’s complaints against ‘Sir John’s [Presbyter]’ ambition to encroach on political power and to make ‘the Ciuill Magistrate their Honourable hangemen’, Dury made it clear what was at stake. It was rather ‘the party which stands for an absolut liberty of Conscience to all’ that, by upholding the ‘state eminency & power aboue the Presbytery’, was recklessly giving statesmen the opportunity of reaching their natural end, that is, the subordination of spiritual matters and of the Church to ‘Reason of State’. Some of the Presbyterians, Dury admitted, could even aspire to extending the doctrine of the jus divinum beyond its own spiritual sphere. But never ‘can a states man, affect any ecclesiasticall man, or Societie or frame of gouvernment further, then hee <& it> serues for his ende, to helpe to bring his people in subiection to him’. Surely, the authority of a Presbyterian church settlement was capable of avoiding just that: it prevented the drive to separation, which would have been brought to ‘a totall dissolution of all Church Communion & gouvernment’.41

19These thoughts were intimately connected to the analysis of John Saltmarsh’s attack on the Assembly of Divines which Dury was then writing. Saltmarsh’s A New Quere was the kind of pamphlet which could appeal to such a strongly millenarian supporter of parliament as Cheney Culpeper.42 Most probably with this in mind, Hartlib had asked Dury for his judgment. Dury was initially inclined rather to ignore with silence men such as Saltmarsh, but then the feeling of a major menace arose. His London friend was forwarding him new pamphlets by Saltmarsh, first of all The Divine Right of Presbyterie, asserted by the present Assembly, and petitioned for accordingly to the Honourable House of Commons in Parliament. With reasons discussing this pretended divine right. This was a fierce assault on the London Presbyterian movement, a confutation of the jus divinum borrowing from Erastian positions and a plea for liberty of conscience. It arrived in Winchester just as Dury was arguing against Culpeper’s fear about ecclesiastical tyranny; he consequently rapidly sent to London the first part of an analysis of it, even before the reply to A New Quere.43 When, three days later, he dispatched the last sheet of the first together with his entire tract against A new Quere, he suggested to Hartlib that this second should be published as soon as possible, even though he had in mind a third part not yet written.44

45 Hp, 3/3/13A-B. The third piece was published by Hartlib with the title Some few Considerations Pro (...)

20The piece against Divine Right of Prebyterie was framed as an ‘admonition’, which had to be forwarded first to Saltmarsh in order to allow him to answer, according to the apostolic rule of forbearance and mutual edification (Eph. 4,1-16) to which Dury wished to remain faithful. It had to be delivered to him concealing Dury’s identity by using the coded authorship ‘M.W.I.D.S.B.’. Saltmarsh would have left his eventual reply at the premises of the bookseller, Nicholas Bourne. Dury’s writing had to be published if Saltmarsh declined a response. Joseph Cranford, the licenser of Gangraena and a key figure of the London Presbyterian network, would give licence to print – Dury had no doubt– the reply to A New Quere, to that to The Divine Right of Presbyterie and a third piece, an answer to the more moderate Independent Henry Robinson.45

46 [M.W.I.D.S.B.], An Admonition given unto Mr. Saltmarsh, 17. The British Library Catalogue and EEBO (...)

47 HP, 3/3/14a-b, ‘John Dury To [Hartlib]’, 28 April 1646.

48 HP, 3/3/34a-34b, ‘John Dury To Hartlib’, 8 September 1646. This second impression was never printe (...)

49 HP, 3/3/35a-35b ‘John Dury To Hartlib’, 15 September 1646. It seems that Turnbull thought that the (...)

21The tract occasioned by A New Quere is known, though historians have rarely, if ever, discussed it in its real political context, as it was published, in contrast with Dury’s initial intentions, only in 1654, under the title A Demonstration of the necessity of some Gospel Government. However, the work against The Divine Right of Presbytery was actually printed during the summer of 1646 as An Admonition given unto Mr. Saltmarsh: wherein His great Sinne in writing those pamphlets, Intituled, A New Quere, Smoak in the Temple, Groanes for Liberty, &c., Is plainly laid open before him, and charged upon his Conscience. As Dury had directed, the Admonition was inscribed M.W.I.D.S.B. As emerges from the Hartlib-Dury correspondence, where Dury refers always to the Admonition as his own work, this code suggesting multiple authorship was chosen most probably simply to dissimulate the identity of the author. The Admonition is dated 24 April, the day on which Dury dispatched its last sheets to Hartlib. It was printed four months after Saltmarsh had failed to respond to his anonymous critic, but had gone on defiantly with his printed attacks on the Divines of the Assembly and of the Sion College.46 In the heat of irritation about Saltmarsh’s new pamphlets, Dury undertook to leak the Admonition to a printer on 28 April.47 In all probability, he subsequently discussed the question privately with Hartlib while he was in London for the debates on the jus divinum. Having returned to Winchester, on 8 September, Dury sent Hartlib ‘the faults of the Admonition to Mr Saltmarsh corrected’, probably thinking a second impression was necessary. He wished for Thomas Edwards, evidently by way of his bookseller Ralph Smith who published the Admonition, to cause ‘such a paper as this to bee printed & affixed behind the title page before the preface’.48 By then, the reply to A New Quere had grown in Dury’s mind into a tract in six parts, though he did not find the time to go beyond the sections already written.49

53 The Presbyterian replies to Saltmarsh’s pamphlets published between December 1645 and June 1646 we (...)

54 J. Saltmarsh, Dawnings of light, (for R.W. and are to be sold by G. Calvert), 30; Smoke in the Tem (...)

22Dury realized that, since the beginning in September 1645, Saltmarsh’s writings had given Independent propaganda a specific twist. Saltmarsh had taken up Cromwell’s commendation of the unity of spirit and diversity of opinions in the New Model Army and, equating, as Burton had done before, ‘idolatry’ with the ‘blind faith’ of the Presbyterian petitioners, he argued for public discussion on religious matters and, consequently, for delaying the church settlement. Commenting on congregational practice, Saltmarsh requested publicity for the Westminster Assembly’s proceedings and deliberations on the grounds that the necessity for evangelical persuasion required the preventive consent of the ‘people’ to the form of ‘government’.50 This was the same point made by others following The Apologeticall Narration and linking the defence of lay preaching and of liberty of conscience against traditional ordination and religious conformity. William Walwyn, for example, asserted this perspective by using clandestine presses in 1644.51 But Saltmarsh’s pamphlets were now forging a public persona of the private Christian who defied Synods, by deploying legal presses and imprints conforming to the 1643 ordinance on print, thanks to the commending imprimatur of John Bachilor, ‘Licenser-Generall of the Sectaries Books’.52 Thanks to this, he had succeeded in dragging some of the Presbyterian Divines of the Assembly, such as John Ley and Thomas Gataker, into the field of public dispute, where he was able to shift the ground of the debate.53 Saltmarsh’s idea that the interest of the people in Christ’s reign was not only ‘of compliancy and obedience and submission, but of consultation, of debating, counselling, prophesying, voting’ was closely linked to his interpretation of the mystery of Christ’s resurrection in the heart of every Christian: the free moving of the spirit, ‘which blows when and where it listeth’ (John 3,7-8), could not be hindered by shutting down presses or monopolising pulpits nor be fixed in any National Church or sect, ‘excluding all societies of men, but of one sort and forme’. On this score, the best argument for orthodoxy taken from the Covenant was turned upside down: the Covenant engaged to seek the reformation of the Church ‘according to the word of God’ which, in Saltmarsh’s reading, meant ‘so far as we doe or shall our consciences conceive the same to be according to the Word of God’. It engaged every Christian enjoying liberty of conscience ‘to reveale to the State, who hath reccomended such a Covenant unto us, what our consciences interpret according to this Word, against Popery or Heresie, unless there could be one universall, or publike infallible Interpreter of the Word of God And Truth, who might determine concerning Heresie’. Saltmarsh did not believe that such a judge could exist. He thus called into question the function of the ministry itself, the need for a State of religious uniformity and the means of discovery, the locus and, ultimately, the status of ‘Truth’.54

23Dury understood that the challenge had been addressed directly to the authoritative powers of the ministry by dislocating Christian edification in a peer-to-peer dialogue and by relegating the role of ministers to simple teachers. In this, Dury shared much of the critiques enumerated by Ley and Gataker. Nonetheless, his analysis went deeper and clearly identified the radical drive in the context of the concurrent religious interests. Dury realized that Saltmarsh was striking at the very middle ground on which Presbyterians and Independents undoubtedly agreed: the need of professional ministers and of clear boundaries for accepted truths against blasphemies and errors and ultimately the role of the Magistrate in upholding ‘true’ religion.

55 Dury, Demonstration, 11-12, 13-5, 21, 30.

56 Dury, Demonstration, 11, 4, 31.

57 Dury, Demonstration,41; [M.W.I.D.S.B.], Admonition 10-12.

24Dury’s Demonstration of Necessity of some Gospel-government, in the same vein as his objections to Culpeper and as his November sermon, consistently defended the work of the Assembly as well as repeating the urgency of getting church government implemented. A speedy course was the duty of the Magistrate, as ‘the settling of the Church-government according to the Scriptures is one of the most effectuall meanes to take men off from striving and crying in the streets, to make them find Christs Yoake easie’, to repress ‘prophaness, to rectifie disordeliness, and to cure ignorance’, that is, to promote the peace and the wellbeing of the country.55 By arguing against the delay of the settlement, Dury did not acknowledge, at that time, any real validity in the Dissenting Brethren’s objections. For him, the Assembly was pressing for ‘the execution of that which is already determined, and needeth no further debate in the Parliament’. The ‘powers of Judicature’ in Church matters were without doubt attributed in the Presbyterian scheme to the Eldership, not only to the ministry as Saltmarsh insinuated. Besides, dispensation of the Gospel and maintenance of discipline were successfully carried out by the Minister in the ‘parochial congregation’, in contrast to the so-called Independent or separatist Churches, where ‘their Principles of Government’ facilitated the break of the necessary ‘Unity of Spirit’.56 In both A Demonstration of the Necessity and An admonition Dury defended the ius divinum in such a way as to underline that Independents endorsed it as well as the Presbyterians as a matter of principle but, at the same time, he upheld the Presbyterian system of ordination and hierarchical church courts, ‘if rightly constituted’, as being the best possible.57

58 J. Ley, The New Quere, and Determination, 20, 33; C. D., Novello-Mastix, or a Scourge for a scurri (...)

25The Divines of the Assembly had already exposed Saltmarsh’s ‘bad’ English, his unseemly poetical vein, the resort to unusual metaphors which he shared with the ‘news-mongers’ trained at the sceptic school, ‘a Sect of Philosophers who are alwaies seeking and never find what they seek’.58 Dury was able to detect in that style a ‘Method of Error’, a seventeenth-century definition of the ‘radical imagination’ which used literate culture against itself.59 As already noted by Ley and Gataker, A New Quere presented a patent error in the verse of 2Cor. 10,8, which on its title page read ‘our authority, which the Lord hath given for Instruction, and not for Destruction’, while the correct wording had ‘Edification’ in the place of ‘Instruction’. To begin with this unfounded variant which exploited an easy rhyme, the Bradsted preacher deliberately dismantled and belittled a reasoned, that is, syllogistic way of arguing to insinuate his convictions by subtle means into the mind of the simple reader.60An Admonition insisted that all of Saltmarsh’s pamphlets were consistent in framing his reasons and arguments ‘in severall Aphorismes or Sections, without Method or Coherence: He is brief and dark, and doth presuppose some things which must be expressed in the examination of the Matter’. Saltmarsh used unfair polemical expedients – for example, citing Thomas Coleman’s Erastian positions to support his own ideas, which were far from being Erastian – and he systematically misconstrued the Presbyterian point of view in order to reduce it to the ‘worst sense’, ‘with much boldnesse and varietie of application, and in such a Tautologicall way to beate it upon the imaginations of Earthly men; and to intricate the thoughts of the simple’.61 Saltmarsh’s writings had intended to distract the reader in order to create doubts and not solve them. He was building ‘a Method to instruct people in the wayes of opposition’. Despite what John Bachilor was saying in licensing his pamphlets, one could not expect sweetness, peace and truth to cure breaches among Brethren from a man who dared ‘to corrupt the word of God for the earlier Introduction of some opinion of his own’. The meaning of A New Quere was perfectly consistent with the ‘wrong’ Bible verse, because it wanted to insinuate ‘that it is fit the Ministeriall Charge should be restrained by the Civil Power onely to Teaching’.62 Dury said more plainly than his colleagues in the Assembly that Saltmarsh was the ‘pen’ in the service of a ‘party’, namely, the ‘machivilian politicians’ who enlisted precisely him in carrying out what was the most dangerous of ‘satan’s stratagems’:

63 Dury, Demonstration, 51. The ‘machivilian’ attitude of politicians and the divisions of the Minist (...)

I believe that Mr. Saltmarsh hath not shot these Arrows against all Settlement of Government, so much out of his own private Quiver, as out of the Sense and Counsells of a Party, which doth strongly Act by those Principles (wherewith they have prompted him, and to vent which they make use onely of his Pen) towards our utter Unsettlement, by a Method of deceitfulnesse, which upon the whimsicall humours of this Age, may become prevalent to disturbe all other resolutions and attempts of all Orderly Courses and Establishments63

64 Saltmarsh dedicated Smoke on the Temple to Oliver Cromwell and to the Viscount Saye and Sele. For (...)

65 Dury, Demonstration, 52.

26At the head of this ‘party’ it is not hard to make out Lord Say and Sele and Henry Vane, whose connections are found constantly behind the group of antinomian preachers and radical authors who followed Saltmarsh’s footsteps at the ‘Black-spread-Eagle’ of Giles Calvert.64 According to Dury, the politicians were prompting this kind of propaganda and giving voice to Separatists and supporters of liberty of conscience as part of their overall design to hinder Presbyterian aspirations and divide Church ministers, in order ultimately to submit the Church to the State.65

67A Plea for Congregationall Government. This pamphlet was entered in the register of the Stationers’ (...)

68 Dury, Demonstration, 37-39.

69 On the Augustinian consensus and the shift from the issue of coercive to that of restrictive power (...)

27Saltmarsh had overshot the mark. Though Dury was able to link style and sense in Saltmarsh’s pamphlets, he was also convinced that he was speaking in disguise. The cosmopolitan irenicist thought that, under the pretence of criticizing the specific Presbyterian project of settlement and of upholding the need for persuasion, Saltmarsh was suggesting ‘that no church-Government ought to be settled upon this people’. Again and again in the analysis of ANew Quere, Dury underlined how Saltmarsh’s argument aimed ‘to take off mens thoughts from the Necessity of any Government at all’.66 Another critic pointed to this sub-textual meaning, arguing that Saltmarsh struck at Presbyterian as well as at Independent ecclesiastic ideas, while pretending to take sides with the Dissenting Brethren. This was demonstrated by the radicality of his assault on the jus divinum, which, as a principle, was not under discussion on either side.67 Dury, nonetheless, perceptively spotted an even more ambitious target. Saltmarsh maintained between the lines of his argument that the Magistrate had no power in religious matters.68 He was dragging the ‘party’ for which he spoke towards the negation of the Christian duties of the Magistrate, of his function in the protection of true religion, which had been till then an unquestioned certainty on all religious sides. Saltmarsh’s arguments were already laying the basis for denying not only the coercive, but also the restrictive powers of the Magistrate in religion.69

28This was the emergence of a radical perspective. It challenged the middle groundwhich was crucial, in Dury’s opinion, to religious peace since the debate had now become public. The ‘reasoned’ way, which he constantly advised and was possible only in the selected meetings of ministers known to the Magistrate alone,70 had faded away and public debate had flung open the doors of the Assembly of Divines. The ‘stinging pamphlets’ became the principal source of division among ministers themselves. Saltmarsh had adopted a systematic policy of provoking honourable Divines to enter a public arena where their syllogistic argument and animadversions were easily exposed, misconstrued, ridiculed by the ‘method of deceitfulness’. Ley, Dury lamented to Hartlib, had naively offered to Saltmarsh the occasion of too many ‘importunities’.71

72 Dury, Demonstration, 27.

73A Remonstrance of Many thousand of citizens and other free-borne people of England, to their owne H (...)

29From this point of view, the content of The Admonition given unto Saltmarsh, the way in which it was delivered privately and in which it was anonymously published were part of a precise communicative strategy to uphold authority. Dury intended to defend the Westminster Assembly as the unique deputed sphere for the discussion of religious differences. His professed end was a rebuttal of the principle of publicity, which was at the heart of the pamphleteering of Saltmarsh and of other supporters of liberty of conscience. The right to be fully persuaded, which Saltmarsh advocated, submitted ‘the actions of Church-Governours in the wayes of Government’ to the judgment of their subject ‘so narrowly that he must needs know all what they do, or else be subject in nothing’. Saltmarsh had manipulated the meaning of Rom 14,5 and 14,23, turning the liberty of judgment in private, circumstantial and secondary things, into the right ‘to be fully perswaded of the nature and grounds of Duties belonging to Government, which is intrusted unto others’; whereas, for Dury, ‘I may do the former, and satisfie my self in what concerns my self, and yet may be safely ignorant of the latter’.72 This distinction, which was designed to withstand a democratic drive which the Levellers’ Remonstrance of Many Thousands People and Citizens made explicit in July 1646, was an important and necessary complement of the Pauline injunction of obedience to the Magistrate (Rom 13, 1-2).73 From this perspective, The Admonition, once published, was the voice of authority which warned the public against following Saltmarsh’s path.

30That, for this end, Dury planned carefully to use the London Presbyterian publishing network, recently powerfully illustrated by Ann Hughes, says something about the strategic awareness of the ‘impartial peace-maker’. It shows also where the lines between radical and conservative perspectives were drawn. Saltmarsh’s fully-fledged individualism in religion pushed for a radical separation of State and Church. This was a challenge to the cultural uniformity which they mutually sought in order to discipline people in the early modern period. Unity in the spirit was other than a church:

74 Saltmarsh, Smoke in the Temple, F1v, 5.

Seeing we all come out of Babylon (though in several waies) to the glorious Temple or Tabernacle which God hath sent down to be with men, and walk thus diversely thither; yet our severall and distinct goings are but like so many Travellers to the City of London; some travell from the North, some from the South, and from the West, some from the East, yet all thither.74

75 [M.W.I.D.S.B.], Admonition,A2r

31‘If this publick reproofe does Mr. Saltmarsh no good either – Dury dictated in response, closing the preface to An Admonition with an unusual Edwards-like voice – hee may expect to bee more sharply dealt with, that he may learn not to blaspheme’.75

32To an admirer of Comenius and a pedagogical thinker, however, the issues raised by preachers and pamphleteers such as Saltmarsh had to be countered on a two-fold level. For Dury, withstanding the dangers arising from public dispute was not enough. He was convinced that if people were ignorant of their duties there was need for an intense pedagogical effort under the guidance of a stable ministry. He also countered Saltmarsh’s theses by maintaining that ‘the grounds’ shared by English people ‘in the common way of Protestancie’ were enough for them to understand the necessity of Church government. At the same time he emphasised that teaching and catechising would have properly prepared them for their place in the Christian edifice without imposition and violence.76

33Significantly, as Turnbull and Rae pointed out, the writings against Saltmarsh overlapped with the devising of a catechism. Dury already spoke to Hartlib and Sir William Waller of his plans for various works on education in April and May, thus revealing for the first time his catechetical endeavours in Winchester.77 At the time when the Admonition given unto Mr. Saltmarsh was circulating, Dury explained precisely to Hartlib the work on which he and his colleagues, Humphrey Ellis78 and Leonard Cooke, were engaged and how he was writing a catechism both to instruct children and reform adults, aimed at overcoming their propensity jealously to guard their old customs, something of which he had first-hand knowledge at Winchester. He wanted it to be printed and gave directions to Hartlib on the setting of the parts, the format, the number of copies needed, also suggesting a printer in Silver Street, John Bellamy as the bookseller and again Cranford as licenser. In these letters Dury also spoke of the preface to this work which could also be printed by itself, because of the importance and the scope of the content.79 In September he pressed for the speedy publication of copies of the catechism, which were in effect dispatched to Winchester by the end of October.80 Dury’s precise indications to Hartlib in this matter may have been one of the reasons why historians did not find this printed work. The only extant copy indeed bears the date 1647 with the imprint “printed for R. L. and are to be sold by Giles Calvert”, the publisher of Saltmarsh. ‘R. L.’ was Robert Leybourne, a printer who was not based in Silver Street but entered the copy of Some Forms of Catecheticall Doctrines at the Stationers’ Company under Cranford license on 23 October 1646. Just as Dury had alerted Hartlib as to the importance of its preface – indicating that it ‘perhaps […] with a little variation might bee made a discourse by it self fit for the public’– the title-page warned that it was ‘in a speciall manner to be taken notice of’.81

34The finding of this printed copy is particularly important because the preface allows us to evaluate the extent to which Dury’s pedagogical reflections were framed in 1646 by his political preoccupations. It emphasised ‘the necessity of Catecheticall Institution’ in Dury’s view of the evolving ‘parties’ strife and of the emergence of the radical challenge represented by men such as Saltmarsh. Echoing the observations on the Winchester flock made to Hartlib, Dury began by stating that the reforming work was obstructed by people who pretended to be extremely zealous and others who stuck to their previous customs, holding religion to be the ‘bare outside of a formall worke’.82 Then he addressed his argument higher by blaming the informal compact between the ‘subtile Hypocriticall Politician’, the ‘dissolute profane Wordling’, those who cried out for Reformation with an unruly zeal, those who followed every ‘winde of Doctrine’, those animated by a ‘spirit of Singularity’, those who by a ‘railing spirit of clamour and contradiction’ tended ‘only to pick quarrels and discover faults’ and those who wanted an unbounded liberty. All these ‘Unruly Actors with their Abettors, the presumptuous ignorant talking Preachers that boast themselves of the Spirit’ stood in direct or indirect opposition to the orderly settlement of government and made ‘the difficulties of prosecuting a setled Reformation almost invincible’. It was in such a context that Dury placed his discourse designed –as he had explained to Hartlib– to buttress the need ‘of some formes in generall which Ministers should agree upon to hold forth fundamentalls from the Scriptures to their people’.83

86 [Dury], Some Forms of Catecheticall Doctrines, A6r. This point is much clearer in the printed text (...)

35In this polemical context, Dury’s educational proposals are found to be less innovative than generally thought, all tending to endorse and confirm the authority of clergy. The title itself emphasised the ‘forms’ of catechesis to be opposed to the ‘spirit’ of preachers such as Saltmarsh. True to his irenic persuasions, he thought it necessary to show the unchangeable, fundamental beliefs which every Christian had to be taught in order to proceed on sure foundations. This was why Dury’s catechetical work provided first the ‘fundamental truths’ of God’s dealing with mankind in his creation and fall, in the redemption by Christ, and the basics of doctrine and worship, whose revelation is the ‘proper Use of the whole History of Scripture’. An ‘historical catechism’ in question-and-answer form, so brief as to be recited in half an hour, was, therefore, the first step for instruction.84 As is generally emphasised, Dury was convinced that teaching had to be in proportion to the different capacities of the diverse ages of man, such that this kind of catechism was conceived above all for children, whose main faculty was memory, although he thought it also fit for the reform of the ‘corrupted forms’ of adults, or ‘Childish professors’.85 Besides, even the two sections –one more theoretical concerning ‘matters of faith’, the other more practical ‘concerning matters of duty’ and obedience– which were aimed at older children, were founded on mnemonic learning. Explanation had to come once they recited the propositions ‘readily by rote as Children like Parrots do’. The subsequent questions asked by the teacher were to be framed in such a way that the learners would be constrained to answer with the words of ‘the Context which they have by heart’.86

88 HP 3/3/24A-29B. On the relevance of the dialectic mystery/history during the English Revolution, s (...)

89 [Dury], Some Forms of Catecheticall Doctrines, p. A7r-v, A5r.

36Though quite original amid the general uniformity and repetitiveness of the plethora of catechisms which were published in this period, Dury’s Some forms of Catecheticall Doctrines presented a very traditional idea of the printed work and religious teaching: the book was a support, a settled pattern for memory, and therefore the instrument of authority.87 As Dury concluded in the letter of 18 August, where he gave the general outline of his catechism, the edification of the new Church government based on the Presbyterial classes depended on ‘some other foundations’, ‘the state of the Ministerial function’ being crucial to the ‘edification of ignorant soules’ –the real point over which the Independents dissented from their ‘brothers’. Dury’s emphasis on ‘history’ was set against the ‘mystery’ in Scriptures through which some of their preachers were dangerously extolling the ‘spirit’ over and above the ‘letter’.88 The utopia of the ‘advancement of learning’ was aiming to embody a middle way here between ‘dull’, ‘barren formality’ and ‘unruly spirituality’,89 and in the ‘forms of catechetical doctrines’ was ready to support the Presbyterian settlement as the most ‘formidable’ bulwark for the authority of the ministry.

37The reform of common schools and universities was, always, a primary means for both Dury and Hartlib to reach religious peace and advance a stable Church settlement.90 Dury had intimated this in his first Sermon to the Houses in November 1645 and the plans for educational reforms in the following years continued to depart from this point. Even if confidence in the possibility of purging the attitudes of adults faded over the years,91 Dury continued to put forward the educational scheme which he had laid out in 1646. The proposals for ‘Advancement of learning’, presented to the Barebone’s Parliament in the summer of 1653, actually developed the schemes which he had set down in May 1646. Contrasting the rational aspects of Christian ‘Truth’ with those which extolled ‘Spirit’ without caring for rationality, they bore the imprint of Dury’s critique of Saltmarsh and, by then, could expose the profanity and carnal licence born out of such ‘unruly spirituality’.92 Based on the early teaching of the historical catechism, catechetical institutions and exercises for the youngest, and conferences for those having attained the age of reason, the ‘advancement of piety’ was still crucial to his plans for the reform of education of the young in The Reformed School.93 The mission of ‘Noble Schools’ and universities in the proposals of 1653, coherent with Dury’s political positions of 1646, was to produce good teachers side by side with a better ministry. They were the only true defence against the ‘misconstruction’ of God’s word.94

38Establishing and teaching the fundamentals was a way of promoting ‘brotherly forbearance’ as opposed to ‘toleration’. This was, in fact, the orderly spiritual foundation of that method of dispassionate reasoning and dispute which Dury commended to Henry Robinson in the papers released to public view at the time of the invectives against Saltmarsh. It was the method he had advised the intemperate Culpeper to pursue and that he was probably seeking in Aconcio.95 It was, in Dury’s view, essential to the preparation of a clergy capable of a ‘free’ but not divisive dispute and to the education of a people ready to bear their ‘easy yoke’. Saltmarsh’s writings had given legitimacy to an unbounded individual exercise on the Word and to public debate. Dury reiterated in all his political writings and activities that a successful and just Church settlement was the product of the orderly education of the people,96 as it was of the orderly conference between ministers, away from the eye, ear and tongue of the layman.

39In other words, reforming education and catechesis was central to the search for the middle ground where, according to Dury, English civil strife could finally end and forbearance could be practised within the boundaries of ‘brotherly unity’ and of the ‘Orthodoxe lines of communication.’ Already in Rotterdam he had tried to advance a ‘middle way, neither strictly formal, not altogether informall’ through ‘set words and forms’ useful in promoting the ‘unity of the spirit’ in the church body.97 In the writings of 1646, while shifting from liturgical to educational emphasis, Dury incessantly pursued moderation between extreme formality and extreme spirituality, ‘Christian authority’ and ‘Christian liberty’. In the political terms of the mid-1640s, this attitude meant seeking an ‘accommodation’ between Presbyterians and Independents and a rebuttal of the public campaigns intended to radicalize this latter. His support of the Presbyterian settlement was due to the unprecedented fact in English history that the Assembly produced a ‘reform according to the word of God’, through what he viewed as the ideal clerical debate under the protection of the Magistrate, but ‘before the power of the State doth meddle therewith’ – as he affirmed in 1646 and restated throughout Europe in later years.98

99 See HP, 3/3/36A-37A, ‘John Dury to Hartlib’, 28 September 1646, and compare with Some forms of Cat (...)

40This was not to say that Presbyterians were free from error. In considering the ‘Scots party’ in particular, their intent ‘to get power from the Civil Magistrates’ and their push for conformity without moderation was not the evangelical way and was also born of ‘State-interest’. A couple of passages of the preface to Some forms of Catecheticall Doctrines, which Hartlib feared would not pass the censure of Cranford, were addressed to those who thought ‘civill sanction’ sufficient to beget the reformation and who sought ‘men and states power’.99 Moving closer to the Independents’ reasons in 1647, Dury made clear that the Classical Presbytery, unlike the Bishops’ Courts, must not meddle in the affairs of the individual congregations. These attitudes, indeed, bore a measure of blame for having pushed the Independents to favour the antinomian preachers who became popular in the Army.100 In 1646, this situation had produced, in Dury’s eyes, an ultimate struggle for or against Church government, which superseded the issue of the reunion of the Churches. The two extremes, albeit unwillingly, joined hands in impeding the settlement of the Church. Therefore in 1652, he could confirm that a major obstruction to the Christian edification was posed not only by those who would have a Church conforming to their particular ‘opinion’, but by some ‘who are in place of Civil trust, whose opinion is that [...] no Ministery at al is to be owned’. Either ministers would finally become convinced quietly to settle their differences through brotherly conferences, or anarchy was going to intrude into the Church and consequently into the State.101

41To avoid this, Dury was ready to support fully the Civil Magistrate who by means of force could suppress the moral degeneration which the ministry should suppress by means of the word, but could not because of their division. In 1646, this meant endorsing the policy that the Presbyterian party was foremost in advancing: ‘to represse the grosse dissoluteness of life by corporall punishments, to restrain open prohanesse in violating the Lords Day, to inhibit superstitious and Popish rites in the Publique Worship, to punish the Authors and Publishers of Blasphemous and Atheisticall Tenets, which fret as a Gangrene....’.102 A few years later, however, it would entail endorsing the Engagement of the new Commonwealth born of the political victory of the Independents. The Engagement established, in any case, a civil authority whose duty, in a Christian State, was to create the conditions for a stable Church settlement. It was in this form that Dury re-asserted the notion of the Magistrate ‘custos utriusque tables’ just when Henry Vane came out in print for the first time to deny to it any biblical foundation. As in the cases of Saltmarsh, the antinomian preachers and the Levellers, many Presbyterians had revealed themselves willing to judge the magistrate according to their private conscience. This was a principle of disorder and dissolution which all of Dury’s political and educational thoughts were, in fact, consistent in resisting.103

105 S. Hartlib, “To the Reader”, in Demonstration of the necessity, A2r-A2v.

42In the 1654 preface to A Demonstration of the necessity of some Gospel-government, Hartlib explained the eight years’ delay in getting it published. On the one hand, he wrote, someone else had produced a response to Saltmarsh fit to satisfy the ‘multitude’. As mentioned above, John Ley’s replies to Saltmarsh had been counted by Dury as being at best counterproductive. It might be thought that Edwards’ Gangraena was the book fit for popular tastes. But most probably Hartlib was referring to Thomas Gataker’s Shadowes without Substance, which was honoured with the thanks of the Westminister Assembly at the very time when Dury’s writings were going to the printer.104 This would appear to explain why the printing of the Demonstration was deferred until the completion of a more comprehensive treatise in six parts. For his part, Hartlib gave an even more compelling explanation. Eight years before, fears that a section of the Ministry wished to encroach on political powers had some foundation. The Presbyterians’ refusal to comply with political authority, which resulted in their open opposition to the Commonwealth after 1649, had confirmed those anxieties. Now, however, they were no longer justified. The time was ‘seasonable’ for Dury’s demonstration of the necessity of Church government to appear in public view.105

43Indeed, the conditions for a reconstruction of a national Church through an agreement between the clerical exponents of the different English confessions of faith became reality. As is well known, Dury had set himself this task since 1652, finding in a new generation of moderate Presbyterians, led by Richard Baxter, a responsive ally. John Owen’s Humble Proposals, first advanced in 1652, though strongly debated until the dissolution of the Barebone’s Parliament, had rallied much of the main Independent Divines in a convergent direction. The new Church settlement took shape during 1654 in the Protectorate system based on Triers and Ejectors, which presupposed a set of fundamentals, even if their actual definition remained controversial.106

107 Nuttall, ‘Presbyterians and Independents’, 4.

44The Independent political victory of the 1640s had contributed to enlarging the boundaries of ‘orthodoxy’. While, in the plans of the 1640s, Dury had strongly doubted even the scriptural foundations of the Independent way and at the time reasoned in terms of accommodation between them and Presbyterians, in the correspondence with Baxter from 1652 to 1654 latitude had been extended to four ‘parties’, which included ‘Arminians’ and ‘Anabaptists’. Their differences in doctrine, worship and ecclesiology were not such as to impede the long-awaited ‘church-union’. The centrifugal drive which had begun in 1645 had given way, to put it in Geoffrey Nuttall’s words, to a ‘centripetal return’ in 1654.107

45However, a question remains about the opportuneness of publishing a work against a preacher who in 1654 had been dead for seven years. The very fact of publishing a reply to Saltmarsh’s A New Quere to welcome the beginning of a new era in religious relations indicates the importance attributed to it by men such as Hartlib and Dury. Though Hartlib expressly stated the reasons why A Demonstration was in 1654 more ‘seasonable’, he was perhaps silent about something which may be found in the letters and books of 1646 and might be related to that importance.

108 R. Bacon, Christ Mighty in Himself & Members: revealed in some short Expressions by way of Catechi (...)

109 The wording of the imprint and the entry in the Stationers’ Company indicate that Calvert was just (...)

46On 20 October 1646, Dury met Lord Say and Sele, the main figure of that Erastian and anti-Presbiterian interest which made use of Saltmarsh’s ‘pen’. Furthermore, in September 1646 a preacher then very close to Lord Say, Robert Bacon, had published a work in the ‘way of Catechisme’ – for Giles Calvert – which looks quite the reverse of Dury’s writings. Suggestively, Bacon affirmed that he was prompted to write it ‘having made a promise of printing anothers Catechism (in writing laying by me) which upon consideration I found many ways inconvenient to perform’. Even if Saltmarsh did not reply to the Admonition, it is likely that one of his friends did not remain indifferent to Dury’s arguments.108 At the same time, it seems that by the end of summer 1646 the Presbyterian network was not as sure an ally as Dury had thought. As I hinted before, Hartlib feared that Presbyterians would not appreciate Dury’s plain dealing with both extremes, the ‘Scots party’ and the preachers that ‘boast of the spirit’, in the preface to Some Forms of Catechetical Doctrines. Nonetheless, the corrections that Dury suggested to Hartlib to allow it to pass Cranford’s license were not inserted. While evidence is scanty, it may be thought that the feeling of having pursued his words against the ‘machivilian statesmen’ too far, at a time when he no longer fully trusted the Presbyterian side, led Dury to abandon his project of a comprehensive treatise against Saltmarsh. This could also be a clue to explaining why Some Forms of Catecheticall Doctrines did not in the end bear the imprint of Samuel Bellamy but that of Giles Calvert.109

110 Compare Dury’s letter of 29 October with Baxter’s response of 20 November 1652, in Nuttall, ‘Presb (...)

47Even so, and more importantly, the context in which Dury wrote and published The Admonition given unto Mr. Saltmarsh and Some forms of Catecheticall Doctrines sheds light on the ultimate appropriateness of A Demonstration of the necessity of Some Gospel-government in 1654. The Cromwellian settlement was born of the agreement of four ‘parties’ to the exclusion of one: the ‘Seekers’, those people who, like Saltmarsh, did not believe that truth could be enclosed within the walls of any established church or religious group. As is well known, Baxter described them as being under the wing of the closest friends of Henry Vane, men such as Robert Bacon. Cromwell had still considered the ‘Seekers’ among the godly to be taken into account in October 1652.110 Saltmarsh’s writings had represented a signalling of political conditions which made possible their challenge to the very idea of a Church settlement. Those conditions meant that people who appealed to the public, supported extensive toleration, and opposed any national Church, had an influential voice with the men in power.

Eight years later, these conditions had come to an end.

111 See note 14.

48By focussing on two unknown writings by Dury and their polemical relationship with Saltmarsh’s pamphlets, from the breakdown of the national Church to the edification of the religious Protectorate settlement, this essay has pursued two aims: on the one hand, it has intended to show that, once the political and polemical context in which they were conceived is recovered, Dury’s educational proposals are found to be conservative rather than innovative; on the other, that their ‘conservative’ bias is fully understood only when we are able to appreciate the challenge to which they intended to respond. In this way, despite recent arguments that oppose a substantive definition of ‘radicalism’ in the English revolution to a contextualist one,111 this essay has presented a sort of case study where the substance of both ‘radicalism’ and ‘conservatism’ emerges in the context of their mutual confrontation on the issues at stake.

112 Dury, Reformed School, 18. Most notably for example Rae John Dury and the royal road to piety, 75, (...)

49In fact, in wishing to underline the ‘utilitarian’ curriculum conceived to make children and all members of society ‘profitable instruments of the Commonwealth’, historians have often seen a democratic vein in Dury’s proposals and read his thoughts on religious teachings in terms of Christian philanthropy. By taking them out of their polemical context, they have generally missed the precise political import of Dury’s proposals, thereby allowing those proposals to be bracketed with others of a very different nature emanating from such ‘reformers’ of education as William Dell and John Webster. We have seen that Some forms of Catecheticall Doctrines, the Admonition and A Demonstration of the necessity of Some Gospel-government presented a very traditional idea of the printed work and religious teaching. Taken together, it becomes clear that all of Dury’s reformist efforts were bent on endorsing and confirming the authority of clergy. Dell or Webster, however, were supporters of broad toleration and were consciously following Saltmarsh’s legacy in suggesting that religion could not be fixed in any human system: consequently, when they contributed to the debate in 1653, they aimed at universities shaping useful citizens and not clerical personnel.112In sharp distinction to this, Dury’s educational plans and irenicism converged constantly to prevent the free, subjective, interpretation of the Word and thus, even though Dury and Hartlib presented to the Barebone’s Parliament proposals for the reform of educational curriculums, their ‘noble schools’ and reformed universities aimed at providing adequate teachers and Ministers.113 The Scriptures were always the one true light and rule of conduct for Dury: the problem in 1646 and in 1653 was teaching them to be read in the true and proper way to avoid ‘misconstruction’.

50What Dury had attacked in Saltmarsh’s writings and was successively practiced by his fellow antinomian Army preachers was a conjunction between free individuality and public debate, a fatal mix capable of unsettling any perspective of Church government and calling into question any authority, as in fact had happened since the late 1640s. Dury’s embarking on the Engagement propaganda can therefore be seen as a consistent development of his opposition to Church dissolution and disorder in changed political conditions: acknowledging the new political powers issued by the 1640s crisis, without questioning their legitimacy, was a pragmatic way of re-investing the State with the Christian duty to promote and defend ‘true religion’. The aim was the reconstruction of an established church. For Dury, it was inconceivable that the way to salvation might be plural.

51John Saltmarsh was no Voltaire. Even so, he thought that there was no single path to Christ and salvation, and for this reason no religious opinion or way should be hindered by human institutions, whether political or ecclesiastical. The ‘radicalism’ of this challenge was plain to Dury. We may, in my opinion, acknowledge this radicalism, and that it was matter of substance, for three connected political reasons, all underlined by Dury. First, Saltmarsh’s view turned on the argument that there should be no established church, shaking to the foundations the strict alliance between State and Church which had been commonplace until then. Second, in order to advance his perspective, Saltmarsh undermined the very middle ground on which more moderate attitudes could meet: the need to have professional ministers and to define clear boundaries for accepted truths against blasphemies and errors. Third, Saltmarsh’s drive toward extreme conclusions (that is, away from the ‘middle ground’ and possible compromises) enjoyed political efficacy thanks to his political supporters and his ability to impose it in public debate.

52Therefore, the confrontation of Saltmarsh’s arguments with Dury’s educational proposals shows that we should acknowledge that radicalism and conservatism are a matter of function in a given political context as well as a matter of substance. Saltmarsh’s individualism in religion entailed a clear-cut separation of State and Church and a new relationship between subject and authority which could bring with it ‘democratic’ consequences. Away from the ‘middle ground’ there was no church, because individuals evaluated their allegiance to beliefs and power.

53This was a challenge to the cultural uniformity which State and Church, all over Europe, mutually sought in order to discipline people in the early modern period: people, for radicals such as Saltmarsh, should be united in spirit, not in a church. The contrary was true for John Dury. His educational plans, in dramatically changing times, were intended to discipline people, banning toleration in the pursuit of uniformity.

Notes

1 J. Dury, Some few Considerations Propounded, as So many Scruples by Mr. Henry Robinson in a Letter to Mr. Dury upon his Epistolary Discourse: With Mr. Duryes Answer thereunto (for Charles Green, 1646) 14.

3 G.H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius. Gleanings from Hartlib's Papers (Liverpool, 1947); H. Trevor-Roper, Three Foreigners: the Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution, in The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (Indianapolis, 2001 [1967]), 219-271.

11 J. Saltmarsh, A new quere, at this time seasonably to be considered (for Giles Calvert, 1645) S491. The date was imprinted on the title page.

12 J. Dury, A demonstration of the Necessity of settling some Gospel Government Amongst the Churches of Christ in this Nation (forRichard Wodnothe, 1654).

13 [M.W.I.D.S.B.], An Admonition given unto Mr. Saltmarsh (by John Dever & Robert Ibbitson for Ralph Smith, 1646), Wing A594A; Some Forms of Catecheticall Doctrines, (by R.L. to be sold by Giles Calvert, 1647), Wing S4506A. The only two extant copies of Some Forms of Catecheticall Doctrines are held by Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, and the Union Theological Seminary Library, New York.

14 ‘Context’ and ‘substance’ appear as mutually alternative in the typology recently offered by Glenn Burgess, who distinguishes three possible approaches to the definition of ‘radicalism’: ‘substantive’, ‘functional’ and ‘linguistic’: G. Burgess ‘Introduction’, in G. Burgess, M. Festenstein, English Radicalism, 1550-1850 (Cambridge U.P., 2007), 7-8; Burgess, ‘Radicalism and the English revolution’, in G. Burgess, M. Festenstein, English Radicalism, 62-86; see also, Burgess, ‘A Matter of Context: 'Radicalism' and the English Revolution’, in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino eds., ‘Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th centuries), Cromohs-Virtual Seminars <http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/seminari/burgess_radicalism.html>.

16 M. Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints. The Separate Church of London 1616-1648 (Cambridge, 1977), 88; E. C. Vernon, ‘The Sion College Conclave and London Presbyterianism during the English Revolution’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999),62-68.

18 Batten, John Dury. Advocate of Christian Reunion, 100-101; The Vow which J.D. hath made, and the Covenant which he doth enter into with God, in reference to the national covenant of the Kingdoms, 1643, in Harleian Miscellany, 1810, VI, 208-212; J. Dury, Declaration of John Dury (1660), p. 9-10

19 J. Dury, An Epistolary Discourse (for Charles Greene), 1644, 33-7. The first letter to Goodwin and Nye is dated June 24/July 4, the second July 7/17, the third July 28/August 7 1642. The book was concluded by Dury’s analysis of the Apologeticall Narration, in the form of a letter to Hartlib dated 7/17 March 1644.

20 Dury, An Epistolary Discourse, 17, 20-22, 25, 29; H[artlib] P[apers], 3/2/4A-5B, ‘Dury to Hartlib’, 17 March 1644; see also J. Dury, A Peace-Maker without Partiality and Hypocrisie (by R. Cotes for Iohn Bellamy, 1648), 56-57. Hartlib had sent him the Apologeticall Narration. Dury had solicited Nye and Goodwin to produce the framework of the Independents’ Church government as early as July 1642, see An Epistolary Discourse 15-16.

23 HP, 3/2/2a-3b, “John Dury To [Hartlib]”, 3 March 1644. Dury had been accused of ‘going ouer by the Kings appointment to betraye & undermine the Counsells of the Parliament & Assembly’ and holding ‘Parliament to bee in Rebellion’. Walter Strickland, younger brother of the MP Sir William Strickland, was the Parliament resident in The Hague, with whom Dury was of course in touch while in Holland.

24 ‘Baillie to William Spang’, 19 April 1644 in R. Baillie, The Letters and Journals, Edinburgh, 1841-42, vol. II, 65-166. Baillie’s comments were not provoked by the letters published in the Epistolary Discourse, as suggested by Paul (The Assembly of The Lord, 125). This is clear from Dury’s letters to Hartlib between March and April 1644 which attest that the last part of his ‘discourse on Independencie’ was dispatched on 28 April, English date. HP, 3/2/10a-B, ‘John Dury To Hartlib’, 31 March 1644, see 10a; 3/2/11a-13b, ‘John Dury To Hartlib’, 7 April 1644, see 11a; 3/2/14a-15b, ‘John Dury To Hartlib’, 12 April 1644, see 15b; 3/2/16a-17b, ‘John Dury To Hartlib’ 27th April 1644; 3/2/19a-20b; 3/2/18a-18b, ‘John Dury To Hartlib’, 28 April 1644.In my view, the direct targets of Baillie’s comments are to be found in Dury’s plea for his own impartial attitude in the letters of 3 and 17 March: see HP, 3/2/2a; 3/2/4A-5B, ‘Dury to Hartlib’, 17 March 1644 at 4a.

25 HP, 3/2/109A-110B, ‘Dury to Hartlib’, 14 April 1645; 3/2/123A-124B, ‘Dury to Hartlib’ 18 May 1645; H. Woodward, Ashort letter modestly intreating a friends judgement upon Mr. Edwards, his booke he calleth an Anti-apologie (1644); see also A. Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), 49-50. Woodward was a schoolmaster and a Comenian and Baconian educational writer associated with Hartlib since 1628, who began in those years to lean towards Independency. In December 1644, he had been coupled with John Milton for defying the provisions of the 1643 ‘Ordinance for printing’ with the protection of influential MPs. See H.R. Plomer, ‘Secret printing during the Civil War’, The Library, 2nd s., V, 20 (1904), 374-403, at 376; LJ, VII, 116; W.L. Parker, Milton: a Biography (Oxford, 1996, 264-265); C. B. Freeman, ‘A Puritan Educator: Hezekiah Woodward and His “Childes Patrimony”’, British Journal of Educational Studies, IX, 2 (1961), 132-142; ODNB, s.v.

26 HP, 3/2/49a-50b, ‘Dury To Hartlib’, 5 August 1644; 3/2/52a-53b, ‘Dury To Hartlib’,18 August 1644; 3/2/55a-56b, ‘Memo On The British Churches In Holland In Dury’s Hand’, Undated [August 1644]; 3/2/54a-B, ‘Dury To Hartlib, 29 August [1644?]; 3/2/57a-57b, ‘Dury To Hartlib’, 8 September 1644; Dury, Declaration of John Dury, 6-7.

29 Dury’s presence at the Assembly is recorded by his vote in the Session of 7 July 1646, (Mitchell, Minutes, 251-252) on the statement ‘Jesus Christ as King and Head of His Church hath Himself appointed a Church government distinct from the civil’. Apparently he did not take part in the vote of the following day, which was ‘nemine contradicente’, but Turnbull is probably right in suggesting that he was in London over the whole period of the debates on the answer to Parliaments’ Nine Question on the jus divinum.

33 Paul, The Assembly of The Lord, p. 471-477; C.H. Firth, R.S. Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, I, 749-754; Baillie, Letters, II, 266. Then, in October, the list of knowledge necessary to be admitted to the Lord’s Supper was approved.

34 K. Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), 379-380.

35 H. Burton, Vindiciae veritatis: truth vindicated against calumny, by M.S. for Gyles Calvert, 1645; id., Truth shut out of doores, for Giles Calvert, 1645. On 22 September Giles Calvert registered the copy of Vindiciae veritatis at the Stationers Company: A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers from 1640 to 1708, ed. by G. E. B. Eyre, C. R. Rivington, E. Arber, Roxburghe Club, 1913-1914, vol. I, 194.

37 See Baillie, Letters, II, 193, 215, 251, 352, 416; Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution, 334-349.

38 [R. Overton], The Last Warning to the City of London (1646); M. Tolmie, Triumph of the Saint, 131; K. Lindley, Popular Politics, 381-382; Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution, 344-345.

42 On Culpeper’s radical stance on ‘religious toleration’ see M. Braddick, M. Greengrass, “Introduction” to The Letters of Sir Cheney Culpeper, 137-150; as underlined by Braddick and Greengrass, his opinions were very similar to those described by David Underdown for the ‘honest’ radicals: ‘“Honest radicals” in the Counties, 1642-1649’, in D. Pennington, K. Thomas, eds., Puritans and Revolutionaries. essays in Seventeenth-Century History presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford 1982 [1978]), 186-205.

45 Hp, 3/3/13A-B. The third piece was published by Hartlib with the title Some few Considerations Propounded, which Thomason acquired on 18 July. On Cranford, see Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution, 138-142, 236-239; J. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers. Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot-Burlington, 2004), 149-150; Nicholas Bourne had been at the forefront of the corantos’ industry and trained John Bellamy, the well-known Presbyterian bookseller, who published with his partner, Ralph Smith, Thomas Edward’s Reasons against the Independent Government (1641): H. R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667(London, 1907), s.v.; J. Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper. English Newsbooks 1641-1649, Oxford, 1996, 8-9, 12-13, 93, 95; J. Bellamy, A Vindication of the City Remonstrance and its Vinidication (by Richard Cotes, 1646), part. 19-20.

46 [M.W.I.D.S.B.], An Admonition given unto Mr. Saltmarsh, 17. The British Library Catalogue and EEBO have it respectively under “B., W.I.D.S.” and “M.W.”. Thomason’s copy is dated 6 August. Saltmarsh had published since March: Groanes for Liberty presented from the Presbyterian (formerly non-conforming) brethren; An end of one controversie: being an answer or letter to Master Ley's large last book, called Light for smoke; Reasons for unitie, peace, and love; Some drops of the viall, powred out in a season when it is neither night nor day, which was a collection assembling all his pamphlets since September 1645. Giles Calvert registered the first at the Stationers’ Company on 4 March, the second on 17 April and the third on 15 June 1646; John Bachilor’s license on the fourth was dated 17 June 1646. While the title-page of Dury’s pamphlet did not name the Divine Rightof the Presbyterie, all arguments in the text are clearly addressed to it. Only the small preface, explaining the circumstances of the writing and publication and referring to the new pamphlets by Saltmarsh, has to be considered written after 24April 1646.

48 HP, 3/3/34a-34b, ‘John Dury To Hartlib’, 8 September 1646. This second impression was never printed, but it seems clear that Dury was sending a table of errata of the Admonition.

49 HP, 3/3/35a-35b ‘John Dury To Hartlib’, 15 September 1646. It seems that Turnbull thought that the ‘Adominition’, a reply to The Divine Right of Prebytery and that to A new Quere were the three parts of the treatise of which Dury was speaking (Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius, 256). On the basis of the printed copies, the first two are the same text, while the Demonstration published in 1654 is actually a tract in three parts such as that announced by Dury in April.

53 The Presbyterian replies to Saltmarsh’s pamphlets published between December 1645 and June 1646 were: J. Ley, The New Quere, and Determination upon it, by Mr. Saltmarsh lately published, for Christopher Meredith, 1645; id., Light for Smoke, by I. L. for Christopher Meredith, 1646; id., An After-Reckoning with Mr. Saltmarsh, for Christopher Meredith, 1646; T. Gataker, A Mistake of Misconstruction removed., by E. G. for F. Clifton, 1646; id., Shadowes without Substance, or, Pretended new Lights, for R. Bostock, 1646; A Plea for Congregationall Government: or, a Defence of the Assemblies Petition, against John Saltmarsh, for Thomas Underhill, 1646.

60 J. Dury, Demonstration, A4r; J. Ley, The New Quere, and Determination upon it, 7, 40-41. While invoking an error of the printer, Saltmarsh defiantly responded to Ley that, in any case, the wrong wording revealed a meaning perhaps truer to God’s ‘Original’, which did not conform to grammatical construction. The wrong version of the Corinthians’ quote stood unchanged in the new impression made for Some Drops of the Viall.

63 Dury, Demonstration, 51. The ‘machivilian’ attitude of politicians and the divisions of the Ministers as Satan’s plan are a recurrent theme in Dury’s writings: Epistolary Discourse, 21; A Model of Church-Government, (by T.R. and E.M. for John Bellamy, 1647), c4v-d1v; A Peace-Maker, 18-19, 20-22 32-34, 72-73; [M.W.I.D.S.B.], Admonition, 4.

64 Saltmarsh dedicated Smoke on the Temple to Oliver Cromwell and to the Viscount Saye and Sele. For the consistent connections of Calvert’s authors to the extended families of Say and Sele and Vane, see M. Caricchio, Religione, Politica e commercio di libri, 67-85; id., ‘The Radical Experience of the English Revolution. The authors of Giles Calvert’, in A. Hessayon, eds., Rediscovering Radicalism in the British Isles and Ireland c.1600-c.1700 (forthcoming).On Saye and Sele’s role in the anti-Presbyterian propaganda and in the Erastian line of mid-1640s see J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The English Nobility and the Projected Settlement of 1647’, Historical Journal, XXX, 3 (1987), 589-590; id. ‘The Vindiciae Veritatis and the political creed of Viscount Saye and Sele’, Historical Research, LX, 141, 45-63; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 81-82, 95, 98-99, 114-117.

67A Plea for Congregationall Government. This pamphlet was entered in the register of the Stationers’ Company on 4 May with Cranford’s licence. Successive references by Saltmarsh to Sion College seem to point to the centre of London Presbyterianism as the place of provenance. Dury’s list of people in controversy with Saltmarsh included one “Mr. W.”. Probably he was referring to the author of A Plea. See, Admonition, A2r.

69 On the Augustinian consensus and the shift from the issue of coercive to that of restrictive powers during 1640s, see J. Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689 (Harlow, 2000), 22-40; C. Polizzotto, “Liberty of Conscience and the Whitehall Debates of 1648-49”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 26, 1 (1975), 69-82.

73A Remonstrance of Many thousand of citizens and other free-borne people of England, to their owne House of COMMONS in Haller, Tracts on Liberty, III, 362. On the political significance of the ‘Ordination controversy’, see R. L. Greaves, ‘The Ordination Controversy and the Spirit of Reform in Puritan England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, XXI, 3 (1970), 238-239.

77 HP, 3/3/13A-B; 3/3/15A-16B, ‘[John Dury] to sir William Waller’, 4 may 1646; 3/3/17A-17B ‘ John Dury to Hartlib, 4 May; 3/3/18A-B, ‘John Dury to Hartlib’, 12 May. The Sloane Mss at the British Libraries preserve the drafts about which Dury was informing his friends in these letters: Mss 649 ff. 52-53r, Mr. Dury’s Exercitation of Schooling (dated 4 May 1646); Sloane Mss. 649 ff. 54-56r, Mr Dury The Heads of Matters to be thought on concerning the education of Noble and Gentlemen, (dated 4 and 7 May 1646).

78 He was later to be the minister inquiring into the opinions and practice of Mary Gadbury and William Franklin; Pseudochristus (by John Macock, for Luke Fawn, 1650); A. Hessayon, ‘William Franklin’, ODNB.

79 HP 3/3/22A-23B , ‘John Dury to Hartlib’, 4 August 1646; 3/3/24A-29B, ‘John Dury to Hartlib’, 18 August; 3/3/30A-31B, John Dury to [Hartilb] 25 August, 1646; 3/3/32A-33B, ‘John Dury to Hartlib’, 31 August 1646; 3/3/34A-34B. ‘John Dury to Hartlib’, 8 September 1646; 3/3/35A-35B, ‘John Dury to Hartlib’, 15 September 1646; 3/3/40A-40B, ‘John Dury to Hartlib’, 13 October 1646. In the letter of 15 September Dury stated also that he had three more parts in mind for his treaty against Saltmarsh.

81 [J. Dury], Some Forms of Catecheticall Doctrines, for R. L. sold by Giles Calvert, 1647; HP, 3/3/35a-35b, ‘John Dury to Hartlib’ 15 September 1646; Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, I, p. 249. For Robert Leybourn, who printed also Ellis’s Two sermons (by R.L. for Luke Fawne, 1647) and worked with Calvert on 4 more titles between 1646 and 1647, see Plomer, Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers, s.v. and Wing Short Title Catalogue - Volume IV - Indexes, New York, 1988-1998, s.v. Rae thought that Catechetichae histitutionis primus gradus post aliquem incomplexam inculcationem principiis naturalis capessendus (BL, Sloane Mss 649, ff 82-83) could be the manuscript copy of this catechism. A comparison with the printed work belies this hypothesis, as the manuscript, written in Latin, is rather traditional and, overall, lacks the emphasis on ‘history’ which characterised the catechism conceived by Dury for young children.

93 Dury, Reformed School, 19, 24-28, 61 (Webster’s edition, 148, 160, 165; the part on pages 24-28 is not in this edition). Dury wrote about the settled conferences fit to those who had acquired the faculty of reason in the letter of 18 August, so completing the outline of religious education which he set down, for the youngest, in the preface to Some Forms of Catecheticall Doctrines.

94 W. Dell, The Tryal of Spirits Both in Teachers & Hearers (for Giles Calvert) 1653; J. Webster, Academiarum Examen, or the Examination of Academies (for Giles Calvert, 1654); Dury, Some proposalls, 186;id., The reformed Librarie Keeper with a supplement to the Reformed School, as subordinate to College Universities (by William Du Gard, to be sold by Rob. Littleberrie, 1650), 1-12; M. Caricchio, Religione, Politica e commercio di libri, 277-296.

95 Dury, Some few Considerations Propounded, 12-13, 25, 33-46; see also Dury, Epistolary discourse, 3-4; id., ‘A Letter of the Learned and Judicious Mr. Dury (one of the Assembly of Ministers) to Mr. Samuel Hartlib touching the Author’, in J. Acontius, Satans Stratagems, or The Devils Cabinet-Councel Discovered; and J. Acontius, Darkness Discovered, by John Macock for William Ley, 1651.

97 HP, 3/2/49a-49b, ‘Dury To Hartlib’, 5th August 1644; Dury, Declaration of John Dury, 6-7. Dury admitted that, in the Aconcio affair, he had been ‘drawn in to promote a Syncretisme beyond the Orthodoxe lines of Communication’: Socinianism was beyond those lines; see Cheynell, Divine Trinunity, 445.

99 See HP, 3/3/36A-37A, ‘John Dury to Hartlib’, 28 September 1646, and compare with Some forms of Catechetical Doctrines, A3v. This corrects Turnbull’s suggestion that they were talking of a passage in a supposed preface to the treatise against Saltmarsh. However, Dury’s mitigations of the text appear not to have been inserted.

108 R. Bacon, Christ Mighty in Himself & Members: revealed in some short Expressions by way of Catechisme, by J.M. for Giles Calvert, 1646, A7v; I. Green, The Christian’s ABC, 589. On the friendly and spiritual relationship of Robert Bacon with Saltmarsh see M. Caricchio, Religione, Politica e commercio di libri, 121-124.

109 The wording of the imprint and the entry in the Stationers’ Company indicate that Calvert was just a seller and did not have any responsibility as a publisher, M.A. Shaaber, ‘The Meaning of the Imprint in early printed books’, The Library, 4th s., XXIV (1943), 120-141. In September-October 1646 Calvert was contacted by Robert Baillie to sell David Dickson’s Expositio analytica omnium Apostolicarum Epistolarum (Glasguae: excudebat Georgius Andersonus & vaenuntur ab Andrae Crook & AEgidio Calvert, 1647), for which there was some difficulty in finding a market; see Baillie, Letters, II, p. 287-289, 397-398, 404